I thought it might be fun to revisit the topics and themes of my earliest episodes, starting with my first essay, “Six Days of Creation and the Sabbath.” It’s been almost five years now and both my knowledge and my writing skills have improved immensely, and my perspective and positions have shifted as well. The circumstances certainly warrant a second look at things.
Tag: satanism
A Theory of General Demergence
This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm, Spotify, and other platforms North of Denver, housing subdivisions give way to rolling plains, long reaches of tall brown grass over a gently rolling landscape crossed by the draws of long-dried creeks and rivers. These tracts are not the boundary of Development but only an interruption. Continuing…
Pema Chödrön and the Sublation of Mental Illness
This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm, Spotify, and other platforms Hail and welcome to A Satanist Reads the Bible. I’m back after a somewhat longer-than-expected break. Fortunately this one wasn’t the result of any sort of catastrophe in my personal life but rather from a confluence of factors: one, I’ve been focusing a lot…
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and Anton Szandor LaVey
I find that LaVey’s ideas clearly fall in line with those that were either exclusive to Rand or shared between her and Nietzsche, and this is the thesis that I’ll be defending in this essay.
Socrates
I thought the best way to get back to work would be to get back to my roots, and indeed to the roots of all Western philosophy, that being the ancient Athenian philosophers Socrates and Plato, whose work is of central relevance to Satanism, as I’ll be exploring in this essay.
Science, Religion, and the Reality of the Unseen
Cajete’s Native science has as much to tell us about religion as it does about modern Western science. For Cajete and for many of the indigenous peoples of the world, the entire universe is in process. Everything is in constant flux: the material world, our lives within it, and even the divine itself are all shifting, changing, evolving.
Entering the Circle: Towards a Satanic Theology
Ever since I transitioned this project from being primarily a blog to being primarily a podcast, I’ve been using the tagline, “Exploring the Bible, Christianity, and other religions and sacred texts through the lens of Satanism in order to reinvent religion for myself.” Aside from some of the early creative and constructive work, I’ve mostly emphasized the exploration part of that tagline, but this episode and the next will be focusing more on the invention aspect. My intention here is to construct a sketch of a Satanic theology, and to that end, I’ll be discussing what theology means, both in general and in relation to the specific source I’ll be drawing from; discussing some of the potential qualities that a Satanic theology would have; and offering some preliminary results. A proper and complete Satanic theology would be better suited to something the length of a book, and perhaps that’s a book that I’ll write one day, but given the space available to me here, I’ll have to confine myself to a more limited collection of ideas. I’ll also be introducing the approach I’ll be taking next episode, which will likewise be a theology, but a very different one and much more experimental in character.
Satanism and the Art of Cooking
Yes, food and cooking is the real subject for this week’s story. I’m definitely having some fun with this one, but at the same time I think that the topic has been very useful in terms of exploring Satanism in an authentic and meaningful way. One of my favorite pastimes is cooking, and this is a skill that is particularly reflective of Satanic values. In fact, I think that the practice is a kind of microcosm of Satanism, a reflection in miniature of the ways that a Satanic philosophy can transform one’s life and experience.
Why I Am Not a LaVeyan Satanist
I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed to find that LaVey was no Satan-worshipper at all. Rather, his Satanism took the form of an atheist religious stance combined with a particular reading of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand along with Satanic aesthetics and symbolism…
Always Anew
I am eternally thankful for all that I am,
Even such a rabid suffering as you have made.